ARMED WITH WINGS LAUNCHED! + Fate of The Current + Winter 2011 ZU Awards

Bubs says, "I shoulda made this post like exactly a month ago!"

So, November 1 saw the launch of the prologue and first chapter (with November 2 and 15 seeing the launches of Chapters II and III, respectively) of my newest and most active project, Armed with Wings. Armed with Wings is a fan fiction novel project whose source is…a Flash game?! Yes, it is. You may not have believed it so, but it is possible to write a full-length fan fiction piece based on an online game. Because, yes, some Flash games and series actually have stories to them. Those are my favorite kind of Flash series, by the way!

Armed with Wings is based on the game of the same name, the first out of five games to be released (but the second in order of occurrence according to series canon) in Sun-Studios' Armed with Wings series (informally known as the Blackmist series). It follows the resurrected commander of a rebel force that had tried to dethrone the tyrant king but had failed; now, the former commander is back for revenge. He will have to scale a mountain and make his way through hundreds of guards and traps before he can reach the king in his castle.

As stated earlier, the first three chapters are already available for your reading pleasure! Armed with Wings is currently only available on the Zelda Universe Forums, but have no fear; there is a table of contents for easy navigation. In addition, a rough audio version of the fan fiction piece that goes up to the end of Chapter II is also available exclusively (for now) through the project's thread on ZU. However, this is a rough version, meaning that I deem it below standard for my audiobooks, so I will be redoing it at some point in the near future.

Armed with Wings can be found here! Enjoy! (It is rated M for violence and language. Please be aware of this.)

Now, I want to take a moment to discuss The Current. Part of the title of this post is "Fate of The Current," which has likely led you to believe that I'm scrapping it. This is not the case. I am, however, officially putting The Current on-hold. I want to focus on Armed with Wings, which I am well into the fourth chapter of. I will likely return to The Current in 2012.

Lastly, the ZU Awards are back! They are currently in the nomination period, with zero nominations for me for any award. The nomination period ends tomorrow. Thought I'd mention that.

That's it! A short update, since I explained Armed with Wings a lot in my last post. Until next time! (My next post will explain what happened with that "Live Q&A Event" thing. In case you were curious.)

Happy Halloween! + NEW STORY: "Star Crash" + Story Collection Thread + Next Up... + This Friday...

Happy Halloween, all! I know I stayed in and got irritated every time the doorbell rang...even though my mom was doing all of the candy stuff! What did you do? Most of you probably did some form of trick-or-treating, a tradition I upheld myself for a time, going as Harry Potter for the last 6 or 7 years of my trick-or-treating life. This was my third year not going out. It was also the year I officially decided that trick-or-treaters annoy me. I'm sorry. But I don't like little children ringing my doorbell every three minutes. Especially not when I'm talking to my mother about serious matters during dinner. Argh!

Today marked the first anniversary of "The First Hour." In its honor, tomorrow, I'll put it up as the Featured Story for a month or so. If you haven't read it yet, it's the perfect Halloween story, especially when read immediately following "Twelve Chimes!"

This past week, Tuesday night (late) specifically, marked the launch of my latest story. Again, sadly, it was not "The Shadow Loop," my planned Halloween story for this year. For more details on that, please see my post immediately preceding this one. Instead, it was a short story written as part of a school assignment, titled "Star Crash." It's an adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, but...in space! It takes the overall/main plot of the play and puts it in the context of the first scene of the play...but all in space! It's an interesting read! "Star Crash" launched late Tuesday night (my time) on the Zelda Universe Forums as my final story to be released as an individual thread (I'll get to that shortly), it launched Wednesday afternoon on Figment, and finally, it launched on Thursday afternoon on deviantART.

This next point is more directed at my readers on the ZU Forums or anybody who ever reads my stuff there. On Wednesday, I began compiling all of the short stories I'd ever posted anywhere on ZU into a single thread. Friday morning marked the completion (for now!) of this thread, when I posted "Star Crash" into it. The thread is a place where readers can view in their full texts all of my short stories (minus "Chosen Ones" and "The Blind Man Who Could See") and where ZU members can post feedback for any or all of my stories, from my newest to my oldest, without necroposting, which goes against ZU forum rules. From now on, all of the short stories that I post to ZU will be posted exclusively in this thread. No longer will they have their own threads for each one. You can find the collection here.

Return to Fan Fiction?! + Return to Novel-Writing

Did I manage to go an entire month without posting here? Wow. Well, my birthday was at the end of last month. Just wanted to put that out there.

Anyway, last month saw my return to fan fiction. What is fan fiction? Fan fiction is written literature (almost exclusively novellas; however, fan fiction novels, short stories, and even poems have also been written) that takes elements from one or more existing books, movies, TV shows, video games, etc. Commonly, these include the characters, setting, and even plot. Pieces of fan fiction are always unofficial, hence the "fan" part of "fan fiction."

Like I said, I have recently returned to fan fiction. That's right: this is not my first piece of fan fiction. Back in summer '09, I began working on a Legend of Zelda fan fiction (it's on the Master List with a link included) of which I only made it to nine chapters before tossing it aside. Why did I toss it aside? Because it was getting pretty stupid. I have always tended to look down on fan fiction, considering it "unoriginal art," lacking creativity on the part of the writer. Given this fact, I have no idea why I decided to return to fan fiction. I think something snapped inside my head a month ago, and I went insane. Or something to that effect.

Back in January, I began watching the English-dubbed French animated series Code Lyoko again, of which I'd first watched a good portion of the first season back in 2004 or so. It is a tween/teen cartoon/CGI science fiction series following the adventures of five junior high/high school-aged boarding students who go into a virtual world called Lyoko, which is located inside of a supercomputer in the basement of a defunct automobile factory, in order to battle an evil entity known as X.A.N.A., which is intent on escaping Lyoko and taking over Earth. X.A.N.A. (which doesn't really stand for anything, as far as the fanbase knows) has the power to manipulate things on Earth, including the ability to possess animals and people.

Why am I talking about Code Lyoko? Because that's what my new fan fiction is based on! The fan fiction, which is updated chapter-by-chapter exclusively on the Zelda Universe Forums, is titled Code Lyoko: Virtualization and is the first in a trilogy of fan fiction pieces known as Code Lyoko: More Than a Game. The first three chapters are currently available, with the fourth chapter temporarily on hold (just for a couple weeks to a month).